Passenger trains, freight trains or other known trains often include a long sequence of rail cars configured to travel significant distances. In some cases, the long sequence of rail cars may be referred to as a consist and may be composed of a hundred or more train assets linked together, such as locomotives, revenue cars, wagon cars, or other known types of rail cars and train assets. In some configurations, one or more locomotives may be positioned at the front of the consist in order to pull the trailing rail cars along a railroad or track, however other configurations and positions of the locomotive are possible. The lead locomotive may serve to communicate with the other rail cars in the consist and execute operations such as increasing speed, decreasing speed or braking. Moreover, the lead locomotive may be responsible for operating a number of control systems that are used to monitor the status, location, or any other helpful metric related to train performance while traveling on railways.
Moreover, in order to accommodate heavy volumes of train traffic, railways may form a complex network of tracks composed of multiple sets of train tracks which extend in several directions. Furthermore, the railway may incorporate multiple switching devices that allow the train assets to move from one set of tracks to another in order to reach a desired destination. In some situations, this switching of train assets from one set of tracks to another may make it difficult for train asset monitoring systems to accurately track such a large number of train assets at any given point in time. As a result, due to the complex network of tracks and the large number of train assets routinely traveling on the railway, an effective system is needed to accurately track the status and location of locomotives and railcars.
Previous efforts have been made to create a system for tracking train assets. However, they have not completely addressed the need to track both assets that are stationary and moving along the railway. One example can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 8,565,913 (‘913 patent’) which discloses an apparatus and method primarily intended for tracking assets indoors, such as in a warehouse. The apparatus for tracking assets includes, a fixed base subsystem, such as a host computer, one or more mobile subsystems that are mounted to a conveying vehicle, an optical position sensor unit and a plurality of optical position markers arranged overhead of the conveying vehicle at predetermined known positional locations.
Although the '913 patent discloses an apparatus and method for tracking the location of one or more assets, the assets being tracked are typically indoors in a warehouse setting. Furthermore, the '913 disclosure provides tracking an asset or conveying vehicle equipped with an optical sensor that is configured to identify particular optical markers. As a result, only the approximate location is determined by the camera identifying a particular marker within view. Therefore, there is a need for a tracking system that includes the monitoring of assets that may not have an optical sensor installed.